Semi-quantum private comparison and its generalization to the key agreement, summation, and anonymous ranking

Semi-quantum protocols construct connections between quantum users and classical'' users who can only perform certain classical’’ operations. In this paper, we present a new semi-quantum private comparison protocol based on entangled states and single particles, which does not require pre-shared keys between the classical'' users to guarantee the security of their private data. By utilizing multi-particle entangled states and single particles, our protocol can be easily extended to multi-party scenarios to meet the requirements of multiple classical’’ users who want to compare their private data. The security analysis shows that the protocol can effectively prevent attacks from outside eavesdroppers and adversarial participants. Besides, we generalize the proposed protocol to other semi-quantum protocols such as semi-quantum key agreement, semi-quantum summation, and semi-quantum anonymous ranking protocols. We compare and discuss the proposed protocols with previous similar protocols. The results show that our protocols satisfy the demands of their respective counterparts separately. Therefore, our protocols have a wide range of application scenarios.